The Crippling Weight of Perfectionism

I've just joined a new gym - Virgin Active in Moore Park. It's a big, shiny, amazing facility that makes me want to go there even when I'm not exercising.

As part of my package, I got 4 sessions with a personal trainer, Laura. As she put me through my paces (lots of bear crawls - I hate bear crawls), we got talking.

Laura is a fit individual. She's got the kind of female physique that's more "power & Rhonda Rousey" than "stick thin and addicted to Instagram". She's very passionate about taking the message to young women that looking and feeling good should include weight training.

As she smashed me on shoulder presses, she told me a bit about her background. Business degree, year of travel, successfully launched a new cafe in two weeks, key sales role at Virgin leading to becoming a PT.

She wants more though. She wants her own big-time business, to take her message to the world and become a super successful entrepreneur. I asked how far she'd got. She told me she hadn't started, but she had lots of ideas.

"I've never failed at anything", she said, "I don't want to start now"

So began another really interesting conversation with yet another super-smart, highly motivated person caught up with having it "just right" before putting it all out there.

"You're a perfectionist, right?" I asked.

"Totally", she said. "How did you know?"

There's a Betrand Russell quote I love."The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts".

It speaks volumes to me about why there are so many truly top-notch advisers struggling in business, whilst lesser colleagues achieve greater success. It's got nothing to do with intelligence. Quite the opposite.

Time to be honest with yourself. The lesson is this.

If you’ve got perfectionism in your business make-up, you are stopping yourself experiencing better results. If you want to improve your finances, life, business and pretty much every other aspect of your existence, you MUST lose the need for everything to be 100% flawless before you move forward.

If you're waiting for the right moment to start work on taking your advice business to new levels, you've missed the point.

If your world view is built on the idea you'll get your offer right in your own head THEN launch, you're wasting time.

If you're still holding out for the perfect SOA template, or the perfect CRM to solve all your business's issues, you'll be waiting a while.

If your plan is to just wait until you've got some headspace to change things, then that headspace will never come.

If you just need one more client to start thinking about the next phase of growth, you'll always need just one more client.

If you're going to put up with everything you hate about your business for just another few months before you do something different, you'll probably be telling yourself the same thing this time next year.

There will always be just one more tweak to make, just one more client to get or just one more issue to bed down before you do some real work on business building.

Meanwhile, those who don't need it to be 100% before putting it out there, and understand that the ever-evolving chaos of new challenges and potential distraction IS their business, they are racing ahead on a very different growth path.

In a few days, it'll be 2016. Hopefully you will have had an awesome period of reflection. Maybe you've recharged some batteries, managed to clear the fog from your head.

There will never be a better time in the next 12 months to take steps to get it done. To plan out what you are going to do from the helicopter view of clarity and JUST ACT.

Whether you do it with your business partners, on your own, or with your BDM, book some time NOW.

Identify 3 things you're going to get done between now and March and complete your first step, no matter how small, in the first 48 hours after you get back into the office.

Then repeat every week until March. Get it 80% done and move on. Give it to someone else to finish, or outsource it and move forward. Put the perfectionism to one side and simply focus on creating momentum.

Here's my offer. If you'd like to spend an hour with me - like I did with about 8 businesses in December - I'll lead you to get super clear on where you're headed, where you're starting from and give you at least 2 or 3 strategies straight up you can sink your teeth into to get results.

Grab some time to chat about how that would work by clicking here. I've got about seven spots free for January before the AFA Roadshow.

I guarantee that if we both decide to do it, you will walk out of our time together with the best kick-start to your year you've ever had.

Next week I have my fourth PT session with Laura. She's promised to give me a plan for the year that will help me smash my fitness goals for the coming year. In return, I'm going to give her the best information I have to help her translate her passion into a few simple steps to get her from stalled to started. I love working with fitness people. Their enthusiasm is infectious.